Saturday, 3 August 2013

bike people are nice people

I've been back on my bike, and back in my beloved Catalonia a
while now. I've taken the chance to head out with a few local groups, sunburn
my lower arms and legs, sweat a lot, search out the best orxata and get lost in
places where I haven't been lost before, and then get hypo and get lost in
places i’m intimately familiar with.

Last weekend was my first weekend here for
Months, I got home to a calendar which was shocking for two reasons, it was
still on the May page and it had pictures of nearly nude med students (I’ll buy
anything for charity). After spending
some time at Dad's house celebrating my little sister's graduation (there's
nothing like being surrounded by three freshly minted doctors all of whom are
feeding you booze/ cake to bolster my hopes for the future of the medical
profession's understanding of type 1 diabetes) and running with my beloved
dog Widgeon I eventually received my bike, insulin and strips (only three days
after I arrived, thanks BA) and boarded a low cost flight to el Prat.

this is the only known way to make running fun

my dad really lives here

Unlike their counterparts at BA the folks at easyjet managed to
send my bicycle on the same plane as me and did so without bending the
derallieur hanger. I managed a build and spin (and ice cream stop) on Wednesday
and a couple of days of what I would like to call training but realistically I’ll
call “the desperate search for my legs” on Thursday and Friday before heading
out with the local club on Saturday. We met at 6:30 for what I was told would
be a “long ride”. Turned out these guys weren’t messing about. With 3x20 on
Thursday and Friday I was ready for an endurance paced cruise. This was anything
but, they took the flat sections with typical Iberian insoucicance and, come
the slightest incline they went absoloutley mental. Having suffered something
of a “Schlek moment” I found myself on the back foot and covered in grease as I
chased back on after extracting my chain from the nether regions of my frame
BEHIND the overpriced piece of metal which is supposed to stop what had just
happened. Sure as eggs are eggs, broken vertebrae are painful and I was hurting
pretty badly chasing the local chippers uphill. Luckily whilst my legs and back
may have forgotten how to climb, my cojones have not deserted me and I showed
them how to go down a mountain without breaking in the apex of every turn.

After 100km of such fun I found myself at a café, with a load of
sweaty blokes I’d never met before drinking coke and sharing sandwiches, salt
shakers and blatant lies about what had occurred over the previous 3 hours. At
this point it occurred to me that the longest ride I’d done post injury was
100km and I had just done 100km, and now I had to ride home. We set off at a
brisk pace fuelled by cured pork and caffeine and I’m not ashamed to admit that
I had to look at the bracelet on my left wrist a few times as we approached the
summit of several climbs. Once my new friends noticed this the pristine
mountain air around Vic was rapidly polluted with shouts of “venga James,
harden de fuck eerp”. As the miles counted down our group whittled down in
size, at 40 degrees ( I still don’t do farenheit) and 160k I wasn’t surprised
when a few people monted the train to Barcelona. Drastically undertrained,
underfuelled and lacking in electrolytes it would’ve been the sensible option
for me to do the same. But I’m not that way inclined. 30km later I found myself
gasping for water whilst pushing a triathlete
towards the back of a paceline moving at 40kph down the autopista.
Climbing the final hill on the way home the wheels came off and I drifted back
through the amassed globeros, as I did so I received no less than 3 different
water bottles and 2 caramelos. Sufficiently
refueled I managed to muscle my way into the rotation and draw out the last of
my hubris just long enough to put on the hurt on the way home.

The group split up 5km from my house and it took a large orxata
and a medium sized (goat’s milk) froyo to get me up the hill and into my shower
where I proceeded to whimper and groan for 30 mins while I attempted to remove
the taste of sweat and suncream from my facial hair.

The point of this is not to regale you all with a tale of how
unfit I am but rather to prove a point. Cycling brings us together in a way few
other things do. I found that out again today climbing Monsteny when I came
across an ambulance and a racing buddy, his friend was in the ambulance and,
joined only by our love for the sport and one mutual acquaintance a group of us
gathered to make the necessary phone calls etc before we set off and inflicted horrendous
amounts of suffering on each other and then bought each other croissants.

If this needed reinforcing
any further I got a lesson in community when my crank FELL OFF on a ride and I found
myself awaiting the opening of Dr bike in Mataro. Now in August in Catalonia “open
at 9” means, we arrive at 9 and get a coffee next door. So come 9 not only did
the mechanics arrive, they also bought me coffee, fixed my bike, gave me a
crank bolt and refused payment.

Where else and why else would you find yourself sharing beverage
containers with strangers, placing your hands on the sweaty lower back of
someone you’d met hours before, splitting a bocadillo with someone 40 years
older than you and, most dangerous of all accepting sweets from a stranger?
There’s something about a shared love for shaved legs, lycra and carbon which
brings people together in a way that other things can’t.

Sure I have met cyclists who I don’t care for (notably the bloke
who told me I shouldn’t come on his ride because I had diabetes) some of them I
try to be polite to, others of them I dispatch on climbs and very few of them I
drop, wait for, drop again and repeat until they take the train home (notably
the bloke who told me I shouldn’t come on his ride because I had diabetes). For
the most part though, I find a shared love for bikes can overcome a lot of
differences.

In the past 12 months I’ve shared a bed in Saigon with a bloke I met
on the Wednesday ride, slept on the floor of someone who’d father organizes
bike races, had a man who shared nothing more than a racing license and a lack
of basic common sense regarding the weather similar to my own undress me in a
freezing gymnasium in the Pyrenees, drunk beer in Spandex with a Belgian
pensioner who once did the race across America, showered in someone else’s
camper van, drunk dozens of free coffees and benefitted from more charity
pastry than anyone else I know. None of that would have happened if I didn’t
race bikes. So whilst I haven’t won bugger all this season It’s still been a great year, I’ve got even more friends
and I’ve had even better experiences.

These are my friends, we ride bikes

I often wonder why so many things which are on the extremes of the
“luck” range tend to happen to me. I think if you put out a lot of happy, you
get it back so when bad stuff happens, the key is to keep smiling, even if you
break your back, because your friends might bring you speculoos in hospital.